When Jeffrey Gray ran for Utah County Attorney in 2022, he said a priority of his was to reinstate the special victims unit, or SVU, to prosecute sexual crimes.

In the two-and-a-half years since he took office, Gray has lobbied for an expanded budget to hire more SVU attorneys and seeks to prosecute these crimes at a higher rate.

At the beginning of this year, the county attorney’s SVU doubled from five attorneys to 10, while the number of case filings have grown annually.

Gray said the amount of SVU cases filed in 2022 was around 200 cases. It increased to 299 in 2023, then 313 in 2024 and is on pace for 406 by the end of 2025.

“With SVU cases, these individuals, mostly men who assault women, deserve to go to prison,” Gray told the Daily Herald. “They deserve to go to prison, and we need to hold them accountable, and a society that doesn’t hold them accountable is going to have that problem.”

This effort attempts to address a significant health and crime issue within the state of Utah.

The most recent data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation indicates there were 59.5 reported rapes per 100,000 people in the state in 2022 and 47.8 reported rapes per 100,000 people in Utah County, each figure higher than the national average of 40 reported rapes per 100,000 people.

According to the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, rape is the only violent crime in the state of Utah that occurs more than the national average.

‘The toughest to try’

Gray can’t explain why rape rates are higher in Utah than the national average, but he wants people to know that the state isn’t immune to these types of crimes.

“To a certain extent I think there might be a false sense of security in our communities, that we’re a safer place and we don’t have to worry about those things,” he said. “But we have the same problems as the rest of the world, and we have people doing bad things to other people.”

To hold people responsible for serious crimes in Utah County, Gray assigned one General Felonies attorney and one Violent Felonies attorney to each of the 10 courts in the county.

However, the SVU was understaffed, with only five attorneys to cover the 10 courts in 2023 and six attorneys in 2024.

That stretched the SVU too thin. Gray said he was losing SVU attorneys because handling two courts at a time and covering the “worst of the worst” cases was taking a toll.

So he lobbied the Utah County Commission to increase his budget to hire four more attorneys.

“I went to the commission and said, ‘We can’t operate with these few SVU attorneys. We need more attorneys,'” Gray said. “And the commission agreed that we needed that, and they granted us four more SVU attorneys. So now, in 2025, for the first time, we have an SVU attorney assigned to each court.”

These 10 attorneys are responsible for prosecuting what Gray deems the toughest cases to try because they are emotionally taxing and the the burden of proof in sexual assault cases can be “extremely difficult” to prove.

Gray said he and SVU Section Director David Sturgill estimate 95% of SVU cases involve acquaintances, and oftentimes, the victim has been in a sexual relationship with the perpetrator.

What can happen, Gray explained, is the perpetrator will agree they had sex but will argue it was consensual, and it’s the attorney office’s job to prove the defendant was aware of the victim’s nonconsent or should have been aware of it.

“These things are done in secret, not in the open. And so the jury is faced with, ‘OK, do I believe the victim, or do I believe the defendant?’ And so it’s our job to demonstrate from the evidence,” he said. “Hopefully we have more corroborating evidence than just the victim, but the DNA and CSI stuff really offers no help when the defendant says, ‘Yeah, we had sex, but it was consensual,’ and so just extremely difficult cases to prosecute.”

This means the screening process to determine which cases to prosecute is critical.

SVU cases are screened through an MDT, or multi-disciplinary team, which involves investigators who investigated the case, a criminal justice center representative and a nurse forensic examiner.

“All of these individuals get together once a case has been investigated and then present the case, and then we determine whether or not we have enough to move forward,” Gray said.

Because of the high burden of proof, they decline more SVU cases than other types of cases; however, according to Gray, there is still an estimated 75%-80% filing rate.

“We’re doing our very best to see that justice is done in all these cases, and when we do decline, it’s not because we don’t believe the victim, it’s because we can’t prove the case,” he said.

Seeking justice

When the attorney’s office determines a case has enough evidence to be pursued, a high priority is gathering input from the victim on how they want to move forward.

Many victims don’t want to go to trial, Gray said, because they’ve suffered a traumatic injury and are forced to relive an assault while in a trial. Also considered are the chances of prevailing in a jury trial, something Gray said is never guaranteed.

The majority of cases end in a plea resolution.

Of the hundreds of special victims cases prosecuted annually, only a handful go to trial. Gray said the year before he took office in 2022, the data showed there were 11 jury trials in Utah County regarding sex cases, with seven resulting in some kind of conviction and four resulting in total acquittal.

In 2023, there were 13 jury trials, 10 resulting in conviction and three resulting in acquittal. In 2024, there were 14 jury trials, with 11 leading to conviction and three resulting in acquittal. Gray said they expect there to be 20 jury trials this year with their increased staff.

“So you factor in, what’s the risk of going all the way to trial versus taking a plea and getting some justice for these victims? … Our goal is to always get (a plea resolution) to as close to what they would get anyway,” Gray said.

He said so far in 2025, they’ve completed eight jury trials, with an additional 27 scheduled for trial, though an estimated two-thirds of those will likely settle.

“Defendants tend to get more serious about it the closer it gets to trial,” Gray said. “And I know that the public hates plea bargains. But the reality is, the system would crash if we didn’t have plea bargains.”

Since he took office in 2023, Gray said there have been “probably a handful or less” of instances where a decision to enter a plea bargain has gone against a victim’s wishes. In these instances, his policy is that the attorneys will meet with him and he has to approve it.

“If we’re going against the victim’s wish — and I learned this early on in my first year — I want to make sure that we’re doing it for the right reasons. And what would be a good reason? A lot of times it’s just a matter of we don’t have good evidence.”

The goal, though, is to be victim-centric in seeking justice.

“We’re doing our very best to see that justice is done in all these cases,” Gray said.